


Found Along The Way

by luvanderwon



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Gen, Raphael is a poetic disaster, Raphael/Ivory implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 09:04:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3931006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Steelhands: How Ghislain followed those rumours and found some prize loot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Found Along The Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/gifts).



It didn’t go exactly the way Raphael described it when they got back home. 

When Ghislain and his miniature crew of opportunists stormed the beach near Seon, there were no worshipful antics and very few fishermen’s daughters to be had. The village was tiny – barely a village at all – just a ramshackle collection of flaking huts, their outsides scrubbed to pale, bleached wood by sea winds and scouring sand. The men who worked the boats and nets had worn faces like used leather and hard winters, their callused, briny hands clutching whatever they could misappropriate as weapons with a determination that spoke of a corner well fought over before. 

There wasn’t much fighting this time. Ghislain held his crew back and asked, in the shabby Ke’Han he’d picked up from sailing and from Yuto, who had joined his crew when they’d raided a tiny port in Jikji, if there was a foreigner in this village. “We don’t want to fight or steal from you,” he called Yuto forward to explain when the fishermen’s faces bore the weathered anxiety of mistrust at a large Volstovic pirate stumbling through their tongue. “We only want to know if you have a foreign man here.” 

“The mad prophet?” one of them asked, in Ke’Han, and Yuto translated although Ghislain knew the word for _mad_ and had to bite back a grin. “What do you want with him?” 

“A prophecy,” Ghislain had Yuto relay. “What else does a man want with a prophet?” 

They led him to a shack without windows at the edge of their tumbledown homes. There was seaweed clawing for entry around the doorstep, and a patch of pink thrift waved anachronistically at one corner of the structure. One of the men indicated the door with his decrepit, blunt-looking sword (the only real weapon among them), and said something from which Ghislain took the words _in here_ and _dangerous_. He pieced the unspoken jigsaw together for himself, and nodded. 

The hut was dank and unlit inside, sand creeping insidiously through every crack and leaving trails of itself in corners and crevices. Against the far wall, Raphael was bunched up with what looked like the wreckage of his flight uniform, although the fishermen had dressed him in one of their own brine-starched tunics and a pair of too-short trousers. He was holding on to the rags of the clothes he’d crashed in like a child with a soft toy, curled against his chest, fingers kneading the slate-grey fabric which still bore the remnants of Natalia’s soot. His hair fell in bedraggled curls like strings of dark spiral wrack, washed only in saltwater for months. He elbows stuck out, too thin. 

“Ah, hello,” he glanced up and grinned, teeth shocking white against the hollow grey of his face. “Another hallucination, I must be hungry. Again. At least it’s one I can talk to. Come in, Ghislain, I’d say have a seat, but...” he indicated the unfurnished wooden rectangle with a sweep of one bony hand. “You see how it is. What can I do for you? Miracles, riddles? Corny reminiscence?” 

“How about a boat ride home,” Ghislain said. The gloom of the shack was stifling, prickling at his neck like a bad omen. 

“Oh, home! Yes, home, marvellous,” Raphael laughed, a dry bark of a thing which didn’t reach his eyes. “Wouldn’t that be nice, if one of the visions these fish folk aren’t interested in carried me off so I can’t have any more of the ones they do care about. Haha. No one ever appreciated your sense of humour, did they?” 

“Laugh if you want,” Ghislain rolled his eyes, “but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. Carry you off. Ready?” 

Raphael laughed right up until the point where Ghislain scooped one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders. He weighed less than a sack of loot from the southern Kirils, and Ghislain pressed his mouth flat and shut against exactly what he thought of that. Raphael choked off the end of his laughter, dry and salted, and said “now usually my delusions aren’t tangible, how about that, what are you, are you, what are you doing?” 

“What I said, sweetheart,” Ghislain told him, “carrying you off.” 

~

He didn’t bother to negotiate. The locals seemed glad, for the most part, to have Raphael taken off their hands. Yuto explained that it was commonly believed among the Ke’Han coastal peasantry that it was bad luck to kill a madman, but that didn’t mean they wanted to keep him, whatever fortuitous things he’d claimed to have Seen for them. “Is he mad?” he asked Ghislain, his nerves valiantly dressed up with a face set for an oncoming storm. 

“He was an Airman,” Ghislain showed his teeth. “That’s a madman’s job.” 

Raphael didn’t start talking sense until they’d put the coastline behind them. He sat at the stern and watched the horizon swallow it up, and when Ghislain had set a course for home and set his men to it, he sat down beside him, facing his ship, and asked as he whittled nonchalantly at a piece of driftwood, “missing your new friends?” 

“Not that this dream isn’t delightful,” Raphael said, his voice flickering and insubstantial like the spindrift, “but what the fuck.” 

“There’s food in the cabin,” Ghislain told him. “Not much, ship’s biscuit and cured ham, mostly, and some apples. Them as don’t eat properly see things funny,” he added. “If you’ve been having visions, mate, it’s because those peasants were too afraid of you to feed you anything decent.” 

Raphael squinted back at the horizon, a curved blue-gold streak between sea and sky now, no sign of the coast. “I hate rice,” he said. Then: “what took you so long?” 

“Thought you were dead,” Ghislain said bluntly, eyes on the knife which picked at the wood between his thumbs. 

“Who else survived?”

Ghislain looked at him then, sympathy writ like folded map lines across his brow, and his hands stilled. “I can’t give you the name you want,” he said, softly. 

Raphael swallowed. His skin was sallow and his face pinched, as if sucking in the pain of that information so it might not leave a bruise. The bones of his knuckles stood taut under the stretch of his dry, un-sunned skin. “They weren’t unkind to me,” he murmured. “The fishermen.”

“I can see that,” Ghislain nodded. 

“Are we going home?” 

He said it like a child, something part feral and part fearful, four small words disguising questions too big for Ghislain to pretend he could articulate them. He and Luvander had shared some potent wine imported from the lower regions of Arlemagne when he’d last been in Thremedon, and their talk had descended into that problem that nobody liked voicing: when it came to war, was it really the survivors who were the lucky ones? Raphael asked _are we going home_ and Ghislain heard _am I safe now_ and _how do I get my life back_ and _I miss Natalia_ and _I don’t remember how to be anything apart from what we were_ and, threaded like a vein through the limbs of all those words, the constant dull heartbeat of _Ivory, Ivory, Ivory_. 

He put down his driftwood and looped an arm around Raphael’s chest, hauling him in against his shoulder and letting his fingers knot in the straggling, tired hemp of his hair. A strange angle: half comfort, half lifebelt; not quite a hug for men who weren’t quite comrades any longer. 

“We’re going home,” he said. “I’m a pirate now, you know. I’m bringing you back as my latest bit of treasure found along the way.” 

“I did always want to be treasure,” Raphael agreed, the salt of his words soaking into the rough brine of Ghislain’s shirt collar. “How long will it take?” 

“About a week. Plenty of time to come up with some outrageous story about why you didn’t see fit to drag your own sorry arse home.” 

“Long way overland,” Raphael observed. “And I get seasick.” 

“Now you tell me.” 

“Hey, you’re the one who carried me off,” he almost sounded light-hearted, but Ghislain wasn’t letting go just yet. Seasick or otherwise, Raphael wasn’t dead and those rumours had been true; Ghislain wasn’t letting go of that until they were safely docked in Molly.

“You should count yourself lucky,” he rumbled, “usually I send my looted gifts back to Luvander by pigeon. If you’d lost much more weight I reckon one could’ve carried you and I could’ve saved myself the effort.”


End file.
